The NFL remains king of media.
The National Football League dwarfs every other American sports league when it comes to TV ratings and revenue. The Super Bowl gets more than 100 million viewers. NFL playoff games will get tens of millions of viewers. Even NFL regular season games will often out-rank NBA or MLB playoff games.
But while there's been a lot of revenue being thrown around in TV contracts for other sports leagues, that might not continue to be the case.
A former NFL executive is warning other sports leagues of what's to come.
Olek Loewenstein, Univision's global president of sports, recently spoke with Sports Business Journal, suggesting that outside of the NFL, leagues will "struggle."
And the NFL isn't going to give anything up, either.
"Every single non-premium right in the U.S. is going to struggle," Loewenstein told SBJ. "It's going to be an inflection point for a lot of these rights holders, to a certain extent, in starting to deploy direct-to-consumer options."
The NFL will dwarf all of the other leagues
The NFL will not budge when it comes to giving up space in the marketplace, either.
"Ultimately, the NFL squeeze will mean fewer potential broadcast partners in the marketplace for non-premium leagues," Awful Announcing wrote.
"The legacy broadcasters will be very selective, only buying properties that they believe can move the needle. That doesn't bode well for leagues. Media rights revenue is generally a function of how many bidders are interested in airing a certain property. Taking a handful of potential buyers out of the market decreases leverage for the leagues."
The NFL will remain king, while every other league might start to struggle in a major way.
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